Bad Boy – Review
Bad Boy isn’t your typical glossy true-crime documentary. It’s more like stumbling into a raw, unfiltered podcast episode that happens to have a camera rolling – jagged, personal, sometimes rambling, but never dull. It doesn’t pretend to be objective, and that’s partly what makes it work.
The film follows Jeremy “Bad Boy” Bailey, a bouncer turned MMA fighter whose name became tangled up in one of Britain’s biggest robbery cases. Stone and co-director Richard Turner don’t try to tidy up his story. Instead, they give Bailey space to tell it in his own voice, letting the contradictions and defensiveness hang in the air.
At 74 minutes, it moves fast but not always cleanly. You can feel the budget limitations in the production the audio dips, the handheld framing wobbles, the editing sometimes jumps like a YouTube upload. But there’s an honesty to that looseness.
Bailey himself is a compelling subject. He’s self-aware enough to know his reputation precedes him, but not always willing to interrogate it. You’re never sure if you trust him, but you can’t look away.
Stone, best known for Rise of the Footsoldier and its many underworld offshoots, brings some of that same energy here though without the dramatics. His interviews cut between old footage, talking heads, and bare, unadorned confessionals. The film occasionally feels like it’s searching for its shape as it goes, but that scrappiness gives it texture.
There are moments when the doc drifts into self-justification — sections where Bailey’s voice dominates so completely that you start to crave more outside context. A journalist’s counterpoint or legal framing could have grounded the story.
Visually, it’s basic but functional. You won’t find artful compositions or cinematic flourishes here – just talking heads and stock footage clips. Stone’s Podcast feels better produced and I think he’d get more meat out of this story in an hour episode of that, than we get here. I felt like I knew about the same about the robbery after watching this as I did before I watched it, which is “not a lot”.
In the end, Bad Boy isn’t about proving innocence or guilt. It’s about what happens when reputation becomes your entire identity – when the nickname that made you famous starts to define every conversation after. It’s rough, uneven, occasionally self-serving, but undeniably watchable.
A scrappy, street-level slice of real-life storytelling. Not perfect, not polished, but full of character.
On digital 20 October from Miracle Media
